Health services are among the most expensive and complex areas of social policy.
Using qualitative comparative analysis to explore 11 developed countries’ health services, this volume considers the links between a range of different outcome measures and levels of funding, social determinants and different types of health expenditures. It also reflects on how those systems responded to the first wave of COVID-19.
This ambitious text identifies which underpinning factors are associated with the strongest outcomes, providing a rigorous account of health systems and health policies in the context of their wider economies and societies.
How do education systems shape educational inequalities and differences in educational outcomes? And how do advantages and disadvantages in educational attainment translate into privileges and shortcomings in labour market and general life chances? Education systems and inequalities compares different education systems and their impact on creating and sustaining social inequalities.
The book considers key questions such as how education systems impact educational inequalities along such variables as social origin, gender, ethnicity, migration background or ability and what social mechanisms are behind the links between education system and educational inequalities and provides vital evidence to inform debates in policy and reform.
In recent years, the United Kingdom's Home Office has started using automated systems to make immigration decisions. These systems promise faster, more accurate, and cheaper decision-making, but in practice they have exposed people to distress, disruption, and even deportation.
This book identifies a pattern of risky experimentation with automated systems in the Home Office. It analyses three recent case studies including: a voice recognition system used to detect fraud in English-language testing; an algorithm for identifying ‘risky’ visa applications; and automated decision-making in the EU Settlement Scheme.
The book argues that a precautionary approach is essential to ensure that society benefits from government automation without exposing individuals to unacceptable risks.
Pro-‘workfare’ governments justify their policies by claiming ‘workfare’ helps enhance self-esteem and promote the dignity of unemployed recipients. On the other hand, welfare activists argue that ‘workfare’ suppresses the dignity of unemployed persons.
This book examines the concept of human dignity in this context and attempts to clarify its meaning. For the first time, it formulates a framework for evaluating the dignity of welfare recipients; uses this framework to explore the dignity of unemployed persons in four different welfare systems: UK, Sweden, China and Hong Kong and compares the conditions of human dignity in each case and identifies factors which enhance or suppress it.
Human dignity and welfare systems is important reading for students and academics in the fields of social policy, social work, philosophy and politics. It is also a useful reference text for politicians, welfare administrators and activists.
How do we find sustainable and human ways to care for people with long-term needs?
This book reveals the ways in which public services squander the potential of people with long term support needs and the creativity and caring capacity of front line workers.
Drawing on the ethos, practices and economics of human focused initiatives such as Shared Lives, this book outlines a new model for public services to replace the ‘invisible asylum.’ This approach, focused on achieving and maintaining wellbeing, rather than on reacting to crisis or attempting to ‘fix’ people, would both ask of us and offer us more. Responsibilities, resources, and risks would be more fairly and transparently shared. The book offers steps which we all – citizens, front line services, and government – could take to achieve this vision.
Health systems everywhere are experiencing rapid change in response to new threats to health, including from lifestyle diseases, risks of pandemic flu, and the global effects of climate change but health inequalities continue to widen. Such developments have profound implications for the future direction of public health policy and practice.
The public health system in England offers a wide-ranging, provocative and accessible assessment of challenges confronting a public health system, exploring how its parameters have shifted and what the origins of dilemmas in public health practice are. The book will therefore appeal to public health professionals and students of health policy, potentially engaging them in political and social advocacy.
This is the first book about the intermediary scheme, criminal justice’s untold ‘good news story’. Intermediaries are independent communication specialists who assist children and vulnerable adults at police interviews and trials, helping to improve the quality of their evidence and providing access to justice for those who previously had been excluded. Richly illustrated with case examples through intermediaries’ own descriptions of their work, the book also includes feedback from justice system personnel and over 70 judges.
This unique book provides a comprehensive explanation of how intermediaries work in practice and gives ‘behind the scenes’ insights into the criminal process. It will be of interest to practitioners and the wider public in England and Wales and encourage consideration of the scheme elsewhere.
. 11 Certainly, the state of the biosphere today ought to provide an impetus for new directions in science. 4.2 The concept of a system A first step toward a collaboration between ecology and sociology may involve recognizing that the two disciplines share a concept that is important to both, namely, the concept of system . As a prominent American educator once observed, ‘an intellectual community’ requires ‘a common language, [and] a common stock of ideas,’ but its development is inhibited by specialization. 12 Since concepts are part of the language
79 FOUR Systems and lives In this chapter I will be exploring some of the things that are entailed by calls for anti-reductionism or ‘holism’ in health policy. In particular I will be considering what is sometimes called the ‘social context’ of health. Many reforming currents in health policy are informed by, and draw attention to, the importance of seeing health – including clinical medicine and individual well-being – in social terms. It has, for example, become a truism in health services quality-improvement work that a realistic prospect of change
Introduction This book has been about comparing health systems, and this chapter is structured around two final comparisons. The first takes factors which were important in terms of causality from the social determinants, funding and expenditure chapters, and sees how they combine for 10 countries (the inclusion of long-term care expenditure means that New Zealand must be omitted). The combinations of these factors are then explored in terms of their necessary and sufficient conditions in relation to health outcomes. The health outcomes measure has been
